21 September 2017
The Accursed
Child pornography addiction.
By John Watson
Can there be a sadder story than that of the Australian politician Rachel Carling-Jenkins who discovered that her husband was addicted to child pornography? She reported the matter to the police and is now haunted by the images she saw on his computer. Her already rocky marriage came to an end. He went to prison for four months and she commented that the sentences given to sex offenders were not sufficient bearing in mind the seriousness of their crime.
You can only feel sorry for her. To have your life ripped apart in that way is a tragedy which, by the grace of God, most of us will never have to face. What is easy to forget, however, is that it is a double tragedy.
We are all born with sexual identities and they vary enormously. Quite apart from questions of homosexuality, confused identity and all the rest, they come in different strengths. Some people are ruled by their sexual urges. To others these are of less importance, possible to ignore or at least to bury with work. There are lots of degrees in between. Strong urges often lead to trouble. They may be containable enough for those who are good at finding partners, but must make life very difficult for those who find it difficult to deal with the opposite sex. Then they lead to frustration and many of the stories that one hears of sexual assaults and inappropriate behaviour stem from that frustration getting out of hand. The urgent need some people have to relieve these tensions is a one of the strongest arguments for legalising prostitution.
How much worse though if your urges are not straightforward but involve a lust for young children, making you long to view child pornography. Resisting this must be difficult indeed. It is so easily available. There it sits on your computer, accessible at all times. How tempting it must be. Just a quick glance, this evening when you are depressed, and then never again. After all the photos have been taken. It won’t make any difference to the victims whether you view them or not. Thus the siren voices hour after hour, day after day, week after week. Of course you should be strong-minded enough to stand up to them but not everyone has that strength. Look at those who resolve to give up drink or smoking, how often they fail, how often they start again. Human resolve is weighed against temptation in many areas and it is not always resolve that wins. Why would it be different for those whose temptations are sexual in nature?
The rest of us can only imagine what this type of conflict must be like. The constant temptation, the guilt, the continual worry that it will morph from voyeurism into something worse. To be born with that type of sexuality is to bear a curse – a curse compared to which those of Greek tragedy are really quite modest.
Still, understanding this is one thing and knowing what to do about it is another. How are we to prevent men with these inclinations feeding an industry which inflicts horrible damage on vulnerable children? Well, the Australians have their answer: four months in prison. Yes, that should certainly sort it. After a sentence like that the addiction would certainly be cured – just as it would be if you had an addiction to drugs or smoking.
OK, that doesn’t work so well so let’s try something more radical, chemical castration for example. I am not a good enough scientist to know whether that would succeed medically but haven’t we seen it before? Didn’t the great codebreaker Alan Turing commit suicide after being made to follow a course of chemical castration to “cure” his desire for gay sex? It is not absolutely certain that he took the cyanide deliberately of course, but the likelihood was sufficient for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to describe his treatment as appalling and to apologise on behalf of the Government. I do not think that we want to go there again.
So what is left? Well, therapy and counselling perhaps – not just with the intention of eliminating urges but also with a view to finding ways of managing them. In their reaction to the 2014 television documentary “The Paedophile next door” which focussed in part on a man who had successfully resisted his urges,the NSPCC described paedophilia as a “‘public health problem’ that needs to be addressed by treating potential offenders as well as punishing them after an offence.” Quite so, and in the case of those like Carling-Jenkins’s husband who are child pornography addicts we need to do all we can to get them to change their habits and to prevent things getting worse.
For those who believe that terms of imprisonment are the only answer, consider this. If you send those who are convicted of viewing child pornography to prison, other addicts will never come forward to receive whatever help or treatment that could help them with their condition. Instead they will lie hidden, continuing to fund this ghastly business and always with a risk that they will gratify their tastes in a more active manner. If you provide and encourage them to receive therapy you will impede this process and hopefully help many of them to lead normal lives.
The great American Judge Louis Brandeis once said “There is no disinfectant like daylight”. The more daylight that can be thrown into the dark world of child pornography addicts, the better the chance of doing something real to help.
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